What could be better than a pod of peas picked straight from the plant?

Easy to grow - but both peas and beans "have their little foibles", being quite intolerant of people with busy lives.   When something needs doing, it can't wait!

It seems that Broad Beans (Fava beans - actually in the vetch family) are among the earliest cultivated plants, with remains found in neolithic sites in the Middle East from about 7000 BCE.   People first collected wild varieties, and then started sowing them with cereals - good intercropping practice!   - and later still as a single crop.

From the Fertile Crescent, the fava spread into the Nile valley, and up into Europe.   Once cultivation spread north of the Alps, around 1500 BCE, the broad bean became a staple food plant, until the introduction of the bean family from the Americas.   Travel in the Middle East today, and the broad bean is on every street corner - in the ful and ta'amiya shops.

The "true" beans trace their historical origins to the Americas.   Runner beans were first cultivated in the humid mountain valleys of Guatemala and Costa Rica.   Common Beans, the generic name for beans such as French, String, or Kidney Beans were domesticated from a different wild ancestor in western South America.   By 800 BCE, the Indians were selecting out for larger seeds and less strong growth.

A third original source for beans, such as the Soya Bean, is China.   The soya is sensitive to light conditions, and unreliable in the UK.

The probable ancestor of our garden pea is a wild type found from the Mediterranean to Tibet, from which the field pea developed by mutation; and from this came the white-flowered Garden Pea.   Peas were being cultivated around 4000 BCE in the Middle East.